Lab Results Shrunken First Semester: Teacher's Pet chapter 5 by maximally

Saturday morning — one week out from the coffee table — she woke him the same way she had every day since.

 

BBBBBRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPP

 

"Good morning, Max." Cheeks tightening, a little pleased noise when he squirmed. "Lab. The first full round finished."

 

Twenty minutes later: coffee, eggs, the private room behind her desk, him still parked in the crack while she booted the equipment because she liked him there when the truth arrived. He could feel her pulse in the muscle around him. He could feel her hold her breath when the file opened.

 

Her eyes went wide.

 

"Hmm," Veronica said. "That's... interesting."

 

"What is it?" All he could do was squirm. She clenched, once, to stop him.

 

"I told you Tuesday it was custom. This is why." She relaxed just enough that he could hear her. "Whoever designed this serum was nothing short of a genius. Usually, these kinds of compounds are single use. You take it, the effects kick in, and that's it. But this one binds directly to your DNA. So once it's there, it's there forever."

 

Max's heart did something stupid and heavy. "So there's no—"

 

"There's no way to reverse the primary effect," she said. "Not from a drawer. We'd need to synthesize a completely new counter-agent from scratch. That's a year of testing. R&D. The works." She scrolled. The chair complained. "Sorry. Sometimes I forget you're not a science guy. Let me dumb it down a little. No reverse on the main effect. But it seems to be designed to respond to supplementary serums that affect different parts of your body. So, hypothetically, we could make you a little stronger, a little smaller, a little more... compliant..."

 

BBBBRRAAAAAAAAAPPPPPP

 

Breakfast left her in a thunderclap that shoved his face into the hole and held it there. He grimaced through it because the words were worse than the gas. Temporary torment had just been informed it might be a life.

 

"O-okay." He tried not to cough and failed. "So... so what?"

 

"So it stops being only a chemistry problem." She peeled him out and brought him up to her face, Saturday light brutal after the dark. "And starts being more of a business opportunity. Up until now, most shrinking serums have been fairly... niche. They're expensive, they're unreliable, and they're hard to synthesize. But this... well, according to these results, this serum might be incredibly easy to produce at scale. And it's modular."

 

Max's face fell in increments. "You're going to start making this stuff."

 

"Precisely." She smiled. It was not a kind smile. It was a founder noticing a door. "And you are going to help me do it."

 

"Me."

 

"Yes, you. What else are you supposed to do now?"

 

"I don't know." He heard his own voice go thin and hated it. "Try to get back to normal. Classes. My dorm. My— Zeke's going to think I ghosted. My parents think I go to college. I was a person last Friday."

 

Veronica snorted, then seemed to decide the snort was unprofessional and put it away.

 

"Good luck finding anyone else who could make that happen for you." She shifted him in her palm. "Then again, I suppose I've already got more than enough of your DNA to start making the serum by myself... so I guess I could let you go, and you could go strike out on your own." She grinned. "Assuming you don't get stepped on just trying to get out of this building. Or found by someone much less merciful than I am."

 

"And even if you made it out of here, then what? Going to the hospital?" Veronica scoffed. "Like any run-of-the-mill doctor would have any clue what to do with you."

 

"You don't think so?"

 

"I know so." She sounded smugger than ever. "I'm sure this seems like a tough break from where you're sitting. But what I'm offering you here is a purpose. A chance to help me build something that changes the world for the better."

 

"By making it easier to shrink people."

 

"Men," Veronica said. "Specifically." The grin again, smaller, worse. "Just imagine it. A guy like you, for every woman in the world. It would be a revolution. Bigger than the internet."

 

He shook his head, not no — not yet — just overload. "I guess I never saw you as a business type."

 

"Ordinarily, no." Veronica's grin grew. "But I minored in Economics as an undergrad. And it's not every day that a trillion-dollar opportunity like this falls into my lap. Anyway, enough talk. What'll it be?"

 

He looked at her.

 

The Saturday-morning hard-ass. The woman who had sat on him and called it a test. The chemist who took him out before she used the toilet. The dorm mother who had lied to Sydney with her pulse hammering against his ribs. The only person on campus who could read the file and the only person who had a reason not to share it.

 

He thought about pink twin-tails and first claim. He thought about a specimen jar in Student Conduct. He thought about Zeke laughing in a doorway that no longer had him in it. He thought about the word purpose and how hungry he was for any sentence that made this week mean something other than you got erased.

 

It was not peace. It was risk management.

 

He nodded.

 

"Let's do it."

 

The words came out like a save file he did not want and could not delete. Zeke's chat was going to sit on a lock screen in a dorm he would not walk back into. He kept that part in his mouth.

 

Veronica nodded back.

 

"Good choice," she said.

 

She did not hug him. She did not say he would be all right. She closed her hand around him, warm and final, and reached for a clean page in the notebook.

 

At the top, in that vicious neat handwriting, she wrote a name that was not yet a company and already wanted to be one.

 

Then she put him back where Saturday night had taught him he would sleep, and House Minerva went on being ordinary on the other side of the door, and Max Calhoun — still three inches, still a freshman, still a person if he insisted — stayed.

 

The weeks after the Offer did not feel like a revolution. They felt like a schedule. The schedule started on a particular morning, and after that it only repeated.

 

bbbbrrraaaaaaaappppp

 

He woke the way he was going to wake for the rest of the semester: face mashed to her asshole, a morning fart already occupying the only air in the crack, panties sealed over him like weather. House Minerva was still dark. Her body was not. Heat, sweat, the slow flex of a woman who had been digesting all night. He coughed against the pucker and felt her wake up around him.

 

She did not take him out.

 

"Ahem."

 

The sound sat there. He didn't know it was for him yet. He waited for a question. She waited too, patient as a lab timer, then clenched until his whole skull was in the fold of the hole.

 

"Start-of-day check," Veronica said into the pillow, faculty-dry. "You can feel that. I can feel you. I want a kiss on it before I stand up. Not a speech. Contact."

 

"You want me to— that's—"

 

The next clench cut the sentence off. His lips were already there. The pucker was huge, sleep-soft, faintly tacky, still sour from the fart that had opened the day. He kissed it because there was no third option that was not more of this. It was a small choice. It still counted as his. The muscle jumped under his mouth. She made a small pleased sound that she would later refuse to call pleased.

 

"Good." Same voice she used on a clean data point. "That's better."

 

Only then did she roll, peel the underwear, and lift him out into the cold room. Water on a fingertip. A crumb of toast. The tank during the toilet. Then back in for the walk across the quad, because she had lecture and he had become part of getting dressed.

 

Email was the other first.

 

She sat him in the seam of a new dark pantsuit — faculty meeting clothes, the kind that showed a stain — opened the laptop, and took her temper out on him so the wool wouldn't have to hold it. The sender was male. He could tell by the way her glutes timed the push.

 

BBBRRRAAAAAAAPPPPPPP

 

Coffee, long, mean. It packed the suit and had nowhere to go except into his face. She kept typing. She ground the chair in a slow circle that rolled him along the crack and mashed his mouth to the hole again, an accidental second kiss he did not get credit for.

 

"If he writes to me like that again," she said, without looking down, "I am going to put him in R&D."

 

Max did not know what R&D meant yet. He would.